Rails%203%20In%20Action

294 CHAPTER 11 Tagging
11.2.2 Fixing the CommentsController spec
The CommentsController spec is failing with this error:
You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.split
# ./app/models/ticket.rb:16:in `tag!'
# ./app/controllers/comments_controller.rb:12:in `create'
Ah, it seems to be from within the tag! method from the Ticket model. The sixteenth
line of this model is
tags = tags.split(" ").map do |tag|
It’s the calling of tags.split that is making the spec fail, but why? tags comes from
the argument passed to this method from the CommentsController’s create action by
this line:
@ticket.tag!(params[:tags])
You’d get this error if params[:tags] was ever nil, because you cannot call split on
nil. Why is it nil in your controller spec, though? It’s because you’re not sending it
through with the other parameters in your spec:
post :create, { :comment => { :text => "Hacked!",
:state_id => state.id },
:ticket_id => ticket.id }
You can solve this problem in one of two ways. The first way is to check that
params[:tags] is not nil before calling the tag! method by adding code to the
CommentsController, or better still, by adding code to the tag! method in the Ticket
model. The second way is to make the controller spec accurately reflect reality.
Because the Tags field is always going to be on the comments page, its value will be
set to an empty string if it is left as-is. The second fix is therefore better, because it
fixes the problem rather than compensating for an issue that will only happen in your
tests. You can change the post method in the test in spec/controllers/
comments_controller_spec.rb to this:
post :create, { :tags => "",
:comment => { :text => "Hacked!",
:state_id => state.id },
:ticket_id => ticket.id }
Due to this small change, all your specs will be passing when you run rake spec again:
27 examples, 0 failures, 10 pending
With all the specs and features passing, it’s commit time! In this section, you’ve created
a way for your users to add more tags to a ticket when they add a comment, which
allows your users to easily organize tickets into relevant groups. Let’s commit this
change now: